Pesticides, Chemicals Can Cause SARS, Asia-Pacific Experts Say

Citing a World Health Organization report in 2001, a University of the Philippines pharmacology professor says that in Third World countries alone 25 million farm workers are poisoned everyday due to constant exposure to harmful pesticides and chemicals that destroy not only the present but the future generations as well. Their lives are further harmed by ill-effects that could lead to SARS and other new forms of diseases, he says. 

By Karl G. Ombion and Edgar A. Cadagat 
Bulatlat.com/Cobra-Ans

The use of pesticides and chemicals in farming and livestock industry could be behind the rise of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and other new diseases, a resource person at the Pesticide Action Network (PAN)-Asia and the Pacific Congress said over the weekend.

Some 150 delegates from 17 countries attended the international gathering held at the Rembrandt Hotel, in Quezon City last week.

Dr. Romeo Quijano, a toxicologist and health and human rights activist, said prolonged use of chemicals and their ingestion by humans could weaken or even destroy the immune system.

SARS has been recorded in several countries, including China, Vietnan and Hong Kong, with many of those afflicted already confined in hospitals. A whole building and its tenants were also quarantined in Hong Kong.

Reports also said the virus-causing SARS could have been resistant to antibiotics with a strain already strong enough to overcome the virus-killing medicine.

In a press conference, delegates to the PAN-Asia Pacific Congress delegates noted that antibiotics resistant strain of the virus had also swept China and Hong Kong the past months. Tens of thousands of chickens were and burned to kill the virus, they said.

Toxic substances

But the disease's onslaught upon the human body has also been exacerbated by the widespread ingestion of toxic substances coming from food we eat that had been fertilized with chemicals, they said.

"The toxic substance whose residue remain in the body, could also damage or destroy the brain in the long run," said Quijano, who is also an associate professor at the Department of Pharmacology of the College of Medicine in UP-Manila.

The widespread use of pesticides and chemicals in agriculture in the world today is causing a new variety of illnesses in humans as well as problems in environment.

Citing a World Health Organization report in 2001, Quijano said that in Third World countries alone 25 million people are being poisoned everyday due to constant exposure to harmful pesticides and chemicals that destroy not only the present but the future generations as well. And the rate of human exposure is increasing everyday, he said.

“Nobody is free now from pesticides and chemicals,” the UP professor said. “Many of us may not feel it now, but its effects are long term. It steadily destroys our immune system, our genes and our minds.”

Experts on pesticides and leaders of farmers' organization in the Asia-Pacific region who presided over the press conference discussed the effects of pesticides on millions of people worldwide.

Among them were Executive Director Sarojeni Rengam of PAN-AP of India; Dr. Irene Fernandez, founder and director of Tanaganita, a women's workers organization in Malaysia; P. Chennaiah, an official of a federation of farm workers' union in India; and Rafael Mariano, chair of the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas. Bulatlat.com
 

Back to top

We want to know what you think of this article.